“Fred” is the star of the NewTeeVee Live conference — The star of the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco: Fred. — Lucas Cruikshank, the hyper, screeching 15-year-old Internet sensation from Omaha who created the “Fred” series on YouTube, won over the adult audience at a conference …

Is Apple Building A Search Engine? — We've received multiple (if thin) reports that Apple is working on a search engine of some sort. — At first glance, the rumors make sense. Apple's Safari browser has 6-7% market share, and currently uses Google as the search engine for both the standard …

What just happened at Valleywag? The FAQ — I love Owen, but he has trouble writing in English during a crisis. So here's the basics on what's happening at Valleywag: — Some guy named Denton can't figure out how to sell ads on Valleywag. — So he's going to sneak Valleywag …

Google Collapses, Analysts Get Bearish — It's inevitable: When you're banging the drum on a stock and all it does is hit you on the head with a two-by-four day after day you eventually get discouraged. (Don't we know it.) No Google bull has truly capitulated yet, as far as we know …

OpenSocial and 0.8! — Today we are celebrating the one-year anniversary of OpenSocial at the MySpace San Francisco offices. As part of that celebration, I'm pleased to announce that MySpace Platform now supports the 0.8 OpenSocial spec! This marks an important milestone for MDP …

New Mac OS X 10.5.6 test build has over 90 fixes — Apple seems to be making a fair bit of progress on the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5.6 update. This week, the company released a new test build of the package to its update testers. This time around, Italian site HMBT is defying Apple's customary NDA …

Where in the World Is Yahoo's Board? — With a $10 stock price, the turning down of Microsoft's $31 a share offer, a collapsed search advertising deal with Google (GOOG), fleeing execs and bad news aplenty, it's easy to blame Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and call for his ouster. — After all, the buck does stop with him.

Online Video: Where's The Money? — Here is the stark reality of online video: nobody is making much money and the enthusiastic projections for online video advertising going from $500 million in 2008 to more than $5 billion in five years will undoubtedly be pared back in the coming weeks as analysts revisit their numbers.

High quality YouTube video hack — You may have noticed that the video of Burn-E I embedded looked a bit better than a normal YouTube video. YouTube has been quietly offering high-quality versions of some of their videos for quite some time via a “watch in high quality” link just underneath the player.

Google: more Macs mean higher IPv6 usage in US — At the RIPE meeting in Dubai two weeks ago, Google presented results from a study about how IPv6-capable “ordinary users” are. And the results are surprising. While an earlier study by Arbor Networks showed only .0026 percent of all traffic …

The next step in search — Today at PubCon we launched a new release of the Live Search API for publishers and web developers. Now, in one place, we're making available what is essentially a content management system for your site or blog, plus the ability to monetize by selling ads.

IntenseDebate is Back! — The wait is over! We're pleased to announce that IntenseDebate has emerged from temporary invite mode and is now available for the taking. — Since joining Automattic, we have been hard at work scaling our infrastructure and preparing IntenseDebate to deliver super-charged comments across the web.

Microsoft Trumpets Cashback Successes — Microsoft Live Search Cashback launched with great expectation in some quarters that it would grow Microsoft's search share dramatically. That, so far, has failed to happen. But Microsoft says it is making progress toward its own more realistic goal …

Dust in Your iPhone? It's Time for a New One — The problem with gadgets that “don't have any parts” is that you can't fix even very minor problems. In his biweekly trends column, PM Senior Technology Editor Glenn Derene buys a new iPhone and destroys his old one—all in the name of a little pocket lint.

A Closer Look at McColo — Yesterday, we published a story about Web hosting firm McColo being knocked offline after being accused by the computer security community of serving as a gateway to organizations engaged in spam activity. — In trying to get a sense of the activity attributed to McColo …

Keeping It All in the Google Family — AS befits a company whose name is a play on words, Google (named for the mathematical term “googol") has come up with playful names for its workers. Employees are known as Googlers, new employees are Nooglers and gay employees are Gayglers.

What does Intel's slip mean? — In my last post, “Why this tech recession will be different,” I observed that this slowdown will not be as severe for technology as was the 2001-2003 period. — But now comes Intel's announcement that it expects revenue for the fourth quarter to be down 10% from its original forecast.